Passage: Genesis 8-9

The Big Idea

God never told Noah how long he’d be on the boat. It turned out to be about a year. But “God remembered Noah,” and He remembers you. In dark seasons, God is working on our hearts before He changes our circumstances. When Noah stepped off the ark, he worshiped with a costly sacrifice, and God made a covenant, sealed with a rainbow, that His kindness will never depart. Even when Noah stumbled, God’s faithfulness didn’t.

Are We There Yet?

One small detail might open our eyes to what Noah went through: God never told him how long he’d be on the boat. For all Noah knew, it could have been a quick splish-splash and done in three hours.

It ended up being about a year, roughly 370 days.

Each morning Noah woke up hoping for a change. Just some land!
Each day his three sons asking, “Are we there yet?”
Each day his wife giving him that look: “Look what you got us into.” (You’re sleeping with the woolly mammoths tonight!)

But Noah was prepared. He’d walked with God for a big part of his six hundred years. He knew God was out there. He knew God had a plan. He knew God had saved them. He probably didn’t know how to answer all their questions.

It’s crazy, and sometimes frustrating, how some people just trust God. You try asking them questions, and they’re never worried. They never seem rattled. They never waver. They just believe God loves them and will take care of them.

I want to be one of those people: a simple, consistent witness of God’s love.

That’s actually what God offers you and me: a simple, radical, stress-free life as a blessed, privileged heir to the throne of heaven. He offers it for free. We don’t have to earn it. What does a prince or princess have to worry about anyway? Besides telling good jokes:

Which animal on Noah’s ark had the highest level of intelligence? The giraffe.
What kind of lights were on the ark? Floodlights.
Which animal could Noah not trust? The cheetah.

God Remembered Noah (Genesis 8:1)

God remembered Noah and all the animals with him in the ark.

Did God forget Noah? No. This is what’s called anthropomorphism: describing God in human terms to help us understand Him.

Does God ever forget us? No. But He sometimes lets us go through seasons of loneliness or desert times to teach us patience. And He will turn His attention to us again.

My dark days

I vividly remember some very dark days in my own life. My marriage at the time was falling apart, and I was often alone. My heart was broken, and I cried my eyes out. I remember watching Facing the Giants, a movie about trusting the Lord, by myself during that season.

There were so many nights I wondered where God was. Many mornings I woke up hoping everything would be fixed, and my first breath hit me like a thousand knives in the heart. Things weren’t better. They were worse. Always worse.

Where was God? Why was He silent? Why wasn’t He answering my prayers? My heart asked every one of those questions, even though I never told anyone I was questioning everything.

But every day Jesus led me. He still does.

He led me to scriptures that I hold deep in my heart to this day. And slowly but surely, Jesus answered every one of my heart’s concerns, by His Spirit, through His Word.

If you asked me to list every lesson I learned or every answer I received, I couldn’t. But the reality of each one is written on my heart, and it shows in my trust in who He is.

It was like the Lord was planting a garden in my heart, a garden of His faithfulness, growing steadily as I stayed with Him.

James tells us to count it all joy when we face various trials, because the testing of our faith produces patience. And we should let patience finish its work, so we may be mature and complete, lacking nothing (James 1:2-4).

True patience, as Chuck Swindoll has said, is waiting without worrying. Because God is going to “remember” you!

Heart first, circumstances second

The work God does in your heart always comes before the work He does in your circumstances. We have to stop looking for our lives to change, and be content with our hearts changing.

You have a lousy job? Sorry! Seek how to glorify God in it, not just how to get out of it.
Your marriage is broken? That’s hard. Honor God by seeking His strength and His compassion for your spouse, and watch what happens.

God will remember you. He sees you crying at night. He isn’t trying to destroy you. He’s building you.

Coming to Him, the living Stone, rejected by people but chosen and precious to God, you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:4-5).

A house: a dwelling place for God.
A priesthood: serving God.
Finally able to please God! That’s really what it’s all about. Not how comfortable you are, or how popular I am, or how easy our marriages are, or how well things are going, or how big your ministry is, or what nice things people say. Pleasing God.

How are we built up? How does a life that pleases God develop in us? By coming to Him.

Not just coming to church.
Not just reading your Bible.
Not trying harder.
Not keeping the rules.

We simply come to Him, and He grows a garden of His love and compassion in our hearts: His own character reproduced in His disciple.

A Wind (Genesis 8:1-3)

God made a wind pass over the earth, and the waters subsided.

When Noah looked around the boat, he couldn’t see the solution to his problem. But God can fix any situation. It’s no problem for Him.

So if He isn’t fixing your problem right now, it’s because He’s more interested in accomplishing something else in your life. He isn’t ignoring you. He’s developing you. And the number one thing He’s developing is your faith.

The Hebrew word for “wind,” ruach, is the same word for “Spirit.” The answer to our problems is always spiritual: an invisible God sending invisible power and invisible solutions into our real, flesh-and-blood world.

That’s living by faith: believing in spiritual realities you can’t see.

The world keeps telling us that if something can’t be proven in a laboratory, it doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. But that whole philosophy defeats itself, because it’s a philosophy, an idea, which is invisible and can’t be proven in a laboratory!

No, the spiritual world is real. Our morals and our ideas prove it. It’s where our Savior reigns as the unchallenged King of all, and where we enjoy every right of sonship.

And whenever there’s an issue in your physical life that needs fixing, a time you need rescuing, help will come from that spiritual Source. Jesus said the Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him (Luke 11:13). The Holy Spirit is the fullness of spiritual power, and He’s given freely when we humble ourselves and ask.

The Ark Rests (Genesis 8:4)

The ark came to rest in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the mountains of Ararat.

Here’s something fascinating. In Noah’s day, the year apparently began in the fall. Later, God told Israel to make the spring month of Nisan the first month of their year (Exodus 12:2), which made the old seventh month into the new first month. Jesus was crucified on Passover, the fourteenth of Nisan, and rose three days later, on the seventeenth.

So the ark came to rest, a new beginning for the world, on the very calendar day Jesus would rise from the dead!

Noah Worships (Genesis 8:5-20)

The waters receded, the mountaintops appeared, and Noah sent out a raven and then a dove. When the dove returned with an olive leaf, and later didn’t return at all, Noah knew the earth was drying. Then God told Noah to come out of the ark with his family and all the animals. And Noah built an altar and offered burnt offerings of every clean animal and bird.

Noah only had seven of each clean animal and bird, yet he sacrificed some to God to praise Him.
He wasn’t trying to earn God’s favor. God had already saved him.
He did it because he loved the Lord and trusted Him with everything.
If God saved him through a worldwide flood, would He let him starve after he got off the boat?
Noah’s mind wasn’t on his resources, but on his relationship with God.

So he offered something that stretched his resources. He gave until it hurt. Why? Because it would grow his trust in God. It put a foot on the throat of his flesh, Noah’s real enemy, that voice saying the invisible isn’t important, isn’t real, isn’t enough.

My flesh yells the same thing at me every day: “You don’t need to be that spiritual! You don’t need Jesus that much! You’ll be a weirdo!”

When Araunah offered to give King David a threshing floor and oxen for free, David refused. He said he wouldn’t offer the Lord sacrifices that cost him nothing, and he paid for them (2 Samuel 24:24).

David didn’t care about the money or the field. He cared about his heart.
He put his boot on the windpipe of his flesh and its desire to be taken care of.
It would’ve been nice to keep the money. Maybe he could’ve fed the poor with it?

That’s exactly what people said when a woman broke an alabaster flask of costly perfume and poured it on Jesus’ head. They grumbled that it was a waste, that it could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and given to the poor. But Jesus told them to leave her alone. She had done a beautiful thing for Him. They would always have the poor, but they wouldn’t always have Him. She had anointed His body for burial, and wherever the gospel is preached, her act would be told in memory of her (Mark 14:3-9).

She did a beautiful thing because she poured out her love.
She didn’t give in to the flesh’s desire to save that flask for something “that really matters.”
She believed in an invisible thing called love, and Jesus said, “That’s awesome! She gets it!”

Your love for God is the opposite of your flesh and everything it craves. So the solution isn’t getting your flesh to try to please God. It’s dying to your flesh and falling in love with God.

God’s Promise (Genesis 8:21-22)

The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in His heart that He would never again curse the ground because of man, even though the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. As long as the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will not cease.

God was so moved by His relationship with Noah that He declared His intention to keep working in people’s lives and not give up on us.
He committed to keep providing for our needs.
And notice: “cold and heat, summer and winter.” The climate changed after the flood. The world was no longer uniformly mild. Many creationists believe the flood triggered an Ice Age.

God Invents the Barbecue (Genesis 9:1-4)

God blessed Noah and his sons and told them to be fruitful and fill the earth. And He said that every moving thing that lives would be food for them, just as He had given them green plants. Only they must not eat meat with its lifeblood still in it.

This is a big deal! The earth was less fruitful after the flood, so God gave a special grace: people could now eat animals.
(Vegetarians are in sin… just kidding!)
It’s a special provision, a way God shows He loves us.

The Value of Life (Genesis 9:5-7)

God said He would require a reckoning for human life. Whoever sheds human blood, by man his blood will be shed, because God made man in His own image. And again: be fruitful and multiply.

Here God gives human government the responsibility of capital punishment.
It doesn’t lower the value of life; it shows how valuable life is, because people are made in God’s image.

Be fruitful and multiply. It might be easier to live a self-centered life, but God wanted them engaged in the selfless work of raising families. It’s hard work to raise kids well! It’s a ministry to the world, producing godly people. Even if we never lead another person to Christ, we can raise our children to know and love Him. Children are a heritage from the Lord (Psalm 127:3).

The Rainbow (Genesis 9:8-17)

God made a covenant with Noah, his descendants and every living creature: never again would a flood destroy all life on the earth. He set His rainbow in the clouds as the sign of that covenant. Whenever the bow appears, He will remember His everlasting covenant.

God didn’t think He’d done something wrong or too harsh in the flood.
He could make this promise partly because of changes He made after the flood so the exact evil conditions of the pre-flood world would never be duplicated, including imprisoning the angels who sinned (Jude 6) and shortening human lifespans.

The rainbow means God keeps His promises. And His promise is that He loves you.

Through Isaiah, God tied His love for His people to this very covenant: just as He swore the waters of Noah would never again cover the earth, so He has sworn not to be angry with His people or rebuke them. The mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but His steadfast love will never depart, and His covenant of peace will never be removed (Isaiah 54:9-10).

The Lord’s kindness is more certain than the mountains and hills. His love never fails.

Noah Gets Drunk (Genesis 9:20-29)

Noah planted a vineyard, drank the wine, got drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. His son Ham saw and told his brothers, but Shem and Japheth walked in backward and covered their father.

Proverbs says wine is a mocker and strong drink a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it isn’t wise. Who has woe? Who has sorrow, strife and wounds without cause? Those who linger long over wine. In the end it bites like a serpent and stings like a viper (Proverbs 20:1; 23:29-33).

What an ending to Noah’s story!

But God still loves us when we mess up. His grace never fails. His love draws us back. His kindness leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4).

Noah’s failure doesn’t cancel God’s faithful love, and neither does ours. We just come back to Him in humility and faith, in an act called repentance, and that sin has no power over us anymore.

Grace Takeaway

You may not know how long you’ll be on the boat. But God remembers you. He’s working on your heart before He changes your circumstances, building you into His dwelling place. Worship Him with your whole heart, even when it costs you. And every time you see a rainbow, remember: His kindness will never depart from you.

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